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I'm having a problem with a RBD simulation. I followed Applied Houdini Rigids 3 for the setup and everything finally worked. Now I would like to work on an actual scene, using an animated alembic instead of animating in houdini with a null. But I can't see what to change or to adapt in the setup to get Houdini to read this animation and make the switch to physics work like in the original setup.
Importing my abc and switching every cache to store a frame range instead of a single one might mess with the constraint system, any ideas?

Hi !
I'm pretty newb in Houdini and after a few months of training myself I'm trying now to create my own setup.
Here I want to move points from a grid randomly to x or y position. A random value is generated every seconds to change the direction and the axis of the next move of each point. I already understand it must be completed with a solver sop, but I can't understand why amplitude is multiplied when I move points into the solver. I need to scale down a lot the movement.
Anyone can tell me why ? Or just take a look to my project file here. Could be nice to have a little help to understand this issue.
Thanks
Dot_Grid.hiplc

Hello!
I'm a new user of Houdini and I'm trying to do a stuff like this (https://gfycat.com/aptdishonestcow), using a fbx animated character.
Im using grains (granular solid) to do the simulation, but i don't know how to start the simulation only at the desired point (The character start running and falls on the ground. I want to enable just when he falls)
Someone can help me to do this step by step?

Artist Michelle Lopez is seeking a part-time temporary mid-senior level animator to modify an existing 360 degree animation of an explosion depicting moving debris.
Seeking artist with 3-5 years production Houdini experience and 1-2 years Nuke experience for 1-3 weeks of remote work, freelance flexible schedule.
The video will be one aspect of an immersive video and sound installation to be presented at the Franklin Institute Planetarium in Philadelphia. The video brings together cultural iconography, the aftermath of violence and visualizations of entropy.
Please reach out with reel/resume to michellelopez@me.com
In-process, low-res version of animation:

I'm trying to create an automated ball roll... I found some helpful tips online but am still struggling to get it to roll correctly. Attached is what I started...
I'm wondering if there is an easier way to rig this? Maybe through a sop solver. Anyways any help is much appreciated!
Thanks,
AutoRoll01.hip

Hi Guys
I have a very specific request from an animator working in houdini. He wants to have all his animation curves on the objects being animated, he doesn't want to be worrying on parenting or constraints.
Right now I have a working tool which it is looking at the values of a source object and keying them to the same parameters on a target object. No problem. But if I wanted to minimize the amount of key frames being created, how would I do that? I can't seem to find a python function for "if key frame present, then..."
So my question is, is there a way in Python to detect key frames and execute a function only when one is detected?
Any help would be appreciated.

BlackGinger is looking to hire experienced Animators for Feature film creature and character work within our Houdini Pipeline.
Both permanent and contract positions are available starting early February 2019.
Creature Animator
Responsibilities
Animate creatures, characters, digital doubles, vehicles and other moving elements
Take direction from project supervisor and animation director
Work autonomously within a predetermined timeframe
Work closely with the rigging team to enhance rigs for production
Collaborate with the development team to improve the existing animation pipeline
Requirements and Skills
3+ years CG experience animating for TV/Film preferably, but not necessarily, in SideFX Houdini
Strong understanding of animation principles, procedures and fundamentals
Strong experience in body mechanics and physics
Further understanding of cameras, cinematography and editing is beneficial
Willing to relocate and work at our offices in Cape Town
Please email jobs@blackginger.tv with the subject CREATURE ANIMATOR.
Include a link to an online showreel and CV.
DO NOT INCLUDE ATTACHMENTS!
Reels must be accompanied with a detailed shot breakdown.

Hey everybody,
I am trying to make a simple sinus animation loop in a seamless way.
If I am not mistake it should somehow work with combining sin($F), $FPS and $FEND is that correct?
Unfortunately I was not able to figure it out so far and it seams like it is not as easy as I thought!?
Thank you!

Hi everyone,
Herer's a little personal project I did over the last year. No keyframes where used for the animation. Each movement is generated through physical simulation or procedural noise.
The Bananas and Pears are done in H16.5 using CHOPs controlled Bones and then fed into a FEM simulation. All the other fruits are done using H17 and Vellum.
ÖBST: "How would fruits move if they could?"
Hope you like it.

I'm working on a project where I need to hand animate a snake-like character doing spirals and twists. Investigating approaches, I came across this video, where the guy basically gives a bone chain wire dynamics, and is able to get some really nice overlapping tail motion, just from animating the root of the chain. At 9:00 of the video he starts to add dynamics, and you can see the animation effect I am trying to achieve at 12:50.
My goal is to find the easiest way to get overlapping tail motion, by animating just the root. So far I'm just trying to get a wire to behave nicely and not explode from a simple sine wave animation, nevermind getting the bones to move with it.
Any rigging experts have advice on how to approach something like this in Houdini?
Thanks!

Hi Everyone,
Wanted to share a little person project I'm working on. Nothing too special but its got some neat ideas in it. The idea is to have a bunch of cubes sitting on the ground that will spontaneously "erupt" into a few more cubes. (Now that I think about it its a similar idea to the multiplying treasure in Harry Potter).
I've got a crude but effective setup going. I think its got the basics in place and it seems to be somewhat stable.
I didn't like how bland the actual "eruption" was looking so I've been working on a way to add some flair to it. At the moment I've got a simple hand-made animation done using two transform nodes. I then take each of the cubes, transform them into a specific place and orientation, run them through the transform nodes with a delay to get the animation, then transform them back to the original position. The transformation is mostly done through VEX. Transforming the pack prims in the right way turned out to be much more involved than I expected but now that its all actually done its not too difficult.
The above animation is not integrated with the bullet sim. Its just a proof of concept to make sure that I can actually instance an animation to the cubes while taking into account their various orientations.
The next step is to get the hand-made animation working within the DOPs sim, which I don't actually think will be as bad as I initially thought. Though time shall tell.
The scene is a mess at the moment so I'll clean it up and post it along with some more detailed notes at a later date for those that are interested

Hello Houdini masters!
Can I ask You, I cannot find any tutorial where is explained this problem: I creaded animation of lets say snake (pipe), but I have problem on edges of animating bones, because it creates me the deformations. Is there any operation, which will make gradient more smoother on those edges. Basically something what will make those connections sofness, or smoother? I hope its understandable, from my question, maybe try to check uploaded file.
Thanks for your help cheers!
problem.hip

For the folks out there looking for a way to do motion retargeting inside houdini, here´s a tease for a tool that has being working for 2 years now! In a couple of weeks I will share more info about how it works, since I don´t have plans to release it, but I will help anyone who wants to do the same - the tool doesn´t have fancy a algorithm, but works very well.
https://vimeo.com/299246872

Have built a decent rig for a Bat Model but cannot figure out how to adjust the capture weights once the Mesh is captured onto the Bone Hierarchy.
Whenever I select the “Edit Capture Weights” tool it keeps saying I have no selected Captured Geometry, but I do have my mesh selected. I just want to adjust the Weights of my rig to get a better animation result.
Help Greatly Appreciated!
Bat-1.hiplc

Hi,
I am currently creating a simulation with flip fluids that are affected by a vortex force.
I need the velocity/lift attributes to be animated independently throughout the simulation, though no matter how I set the settings for either the sop geometry, or vortex force operator, the values will not change throughout the simulation.
What is the proper method for animating these attributes for use in dops?
Thank you,

Hi,
It seems that generally when animating objects in scene/object level, you are only able to animate variables globally.
I have a scene with a spinning propeller, and this spinning propeller needs to rotate around its own axis, while being placed in a certain spot in the scene. How is this achieved? All transforms in the scene are global space, so if you need to rotate the object 30 degrees on the X axis, the Y axis will not follow the local transforms and the propeller will spin sideways in circles.
Followup question:
I briefly had a teacher from Lost Boys school of VFX and he showed me how to properly load animation data into a dopnet. Unfortunately I was just starting out with Houdini as he showed me, so I did not catch the method. I gathered that this should not be done in sop-level ('Use deforming geometry'), and rather with motion / 'RBD keyframe active' operators in the dopnet -- how do I load in my animation data, so the velocities are correct with proper interpolation?
Thank you,

Hey everyone, I'm happy to introduce Bullet Breaker Core, a toolkit for easy animation of bullet simulations.
Link to Bullet Breaker toolkit -> gum.co/hTnq
The purpose of Bullet Breaker is to allow for easy animation control of fracturing objects inside of Bullet simulations in Houdini.
Bullet Breaker Core comes with digital assets to allow for ease of use in setting up and visualizing Bullet Breaker attributes.
Bullet Breaker Core also comes with a brief tutorial which goes over how to setup bullet breaker compatible fracture geometries.
Bullet Breaker Core does not use Houdini constraints and while it is possible to use Bullet Breaker with Houdini Constraints it is not meant to be used with Houdini constraints.
Includes the demo scene file and all digital assets!
Hope people find this toolkit useful!
You can reach me at trzankofx@gmail.com for questions or comments.

Finally finished this example that's been sitting on my backburner. It's a really simple demonstration of how you can use the Pose Tool and Pose Scopes to get invisible rigs and motion paths in Houdini.
Has anyone used them in production, by chance? What's been your experience?
Caveat: that hip file is definitely NOT an example of good rigging practice, by any means!
Industrial Robot Arm by UX3D on Sketchfab (CC BY-NC 4.0)
invisible_rigs_motion_paths.hipnc

I have a lattice deforming an object. I want to animate the lattice points, but I can't figure out how to animate the lattice points themselves and not the lattice as a whole.
How do I animate/set keyframes on the individual points?
Thanks

Hey guys, i have an alembic animated file (there's no deformation) and I have to convert this object to a vdb mesh (vdb from polygons >> convert vdb).
I did it on a static frame (using timeshift) and now i'd like to copy the original animation to this new mesh.
A copystamp does copy the position but not the rotation. Can you guys help me with this?
Just to make things clearer
(this is not the original scene, i'm kinda faking it so i can share here)
this is the alembic character animated:
then I made this new mesh from it:
i need to transfer the position and orientation from the first one to the second one. I guess i could make it with a packed object since it have just one point
Thx!
RnD_copy.tansformation.v1.01.hiplc

Hello this question was originally asked here (and I have pretty much the same question)
https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/46028/
"I am wondering if it's possible to simulate a thin layer of ocean from any given geometry mesh in houdini?"
Or from my input mesh that is a deforming animated plane? It is basically wave previs anim from Maya -- I am looking to drive a flip sim with this animation similarly to bifrost guided parameters:
In the sidefx forum I linked someone mentioned
"- detect position of flip particle if it is below or above the surface if below the surface but the distance with the surface is below a certain threshold advect it by the point velocity. if the distance is more than the treshold
it get deleted every frame."
I was wondering if someone can headstart me with how to go about this implementation, does this process need to be done within the solver?
Thank you all for your time!
-Shane

Hey All,
I've been trying to work out a simple pipeline to generate a crowd from impostors for use in Unreal 4 using models from Fuse with animations from Mixamo. Creating characters in Fuse is extremely fast and simple, and the one-click option to send it to mixamo to rig it and load in animations opens up a lot of potential for easy crowd generation. However, with a lot of projects shifting towards VR / AR these days we need more and more efficient crowds. The impostor workflow offers a great solution for that, and the GameDev Impostor Camera Rig + GameDev Impostor Texture ROP really set it up to be really nice and easy to generate the output - but I'm running into some issues and could use some outside opinions.
For reference, I'm following Mike Lyndon's documentation here: https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/generating-impostor-textures/
So far, the following steps are working out pretty well -
1) Create Character in Fuse
2) Rig and Animate Fuse Character with Mixamo
3) Import FBX to Houdini
4) Extract FBX Geo to new Geo node
5) Create new Mat inside new Geo node, remap existing materials
6) Create GameDev Impostor Camera Rig at obj level
7) Create ROP Network, create GameDev Impostor Texture inside ROP network
8) Direct Camera Rig towards Impostor Texture, Direct Impostor Texture towards Camera Rig
9) Set Impostor Texture to 'Animation' mode and render out to $HIP/TEST/${OS}_${WEDGE}.$F4.png (or appropriate directory / filetype, this is for testing purposes)
The problem I run into is at render time; the ROP is intended (afaik) to render out the frames of animation, rotate the camera, and then render out the frames of animation again from the new angle. It does exactly this, but overwrites the first frames of the animation each time the camera rotates. I thought the _${WEDGE} portion of the file naming would handle this but it doesn't seem to be appended to my filenames. Right now I'm getting "rop_impostor_texture1.0006.png" where 'rop_impostor_texture1' is the name of my impostor texture and '0006' is the frame.
Any thoughts as to why this might be happening or possible solutions would be appreciated. Please let me know if any specific screenshots would help (ie. the ROP, Camera Rig, etc).
UPDATE 001)
**NOTE: This only applies to non-production build 1.20; the naming is set up properly in production build 1.12**
Solved the naming / output issue, it turns out the GameDev_Impostor_Texture rop was looking for the wrong output picture parm. This is the field that needs to be re-directed for the output to work as expected:
Also worth noting is that if you assemble the sprite sheet expecting the Unreal shader template to work, be sure to have the animation frames in the Y axis and and camera rotation in the X axis.
The next major hurdle for me is to try to reduce the camera rotation range to 180 degrees, since I don't need the back views of my crowd characters, and to limit the animation frames... which I'm more concerned about at the moment. I need to retarget a 64 frame animation down to ~16 frames or less. The fewer I can get it down to, the potentially higher resolution I can let the individual sprites be. More updates to come.

Hello all,
Getting to it I have a camera in Maya with camera shake enabled. I know baking can only work if the Horizontal Shake and Vertical shake options have been moved from the background to the channel box with the Channel Control in the shape node of the camera. Once it's baked I export it as .fbx into Houdini(16.5 if it matters). But the camera shake still doesn't show up in Houdini. Also of note, I looked through the camera settings in Houdini and I don't find anything similar to a camera shake option in there, so maybe because there isn't a setting it won't use that baked information but I am truly stuck. For fun I attached the camera, don't know if it's useful but its there.
TL;DR = Camera shake from Maya camera doesn't import into Houdini, what do?
Thanks.
Edit for all the people out there. The solution is to just not use .fbx. Just use alembic guys, it works. Hopefully somebody else in the future will be able to use this advice so they didn't have to be me scrolling around google for two hours.
CameraExport_01.fbx